Snapshot

34

That was the early hours of Thursday. A raw wind had risen by the time Challis and Ellen returned to CIU, and there was a message for Challis to telephone his elderly next-door neighbour. ‘A huge gum tree’s come down across your driveway, Hal. It’s sticking out into the road. I tried to cut it up but can’t start my chainsaw.’

‘Try the shire,’ Challis said, shrugging out of his coat.

‘I did. There are trees and branches down everywhere and they can’t promise they’ll get around to it today.’

Challis cursed. Ten o’clock. He was obliged to attend the Navy inquest at eleven. ‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’

He dragged on his coat again, grabbed his laptop and inquest notes, and stopped at Ellen’s desk. ‘I’ll be out for two or three hours. I want you to call on Janine’s sister. I doubt if Janine was the confiding type, but I’m pretty sure Meg intuited something about her recent activities.’

Ellen sat back in her chair, tapping a pen against her teeth. ‘Everything in this case is a trace of a ghost of a faint chance of a possibility.’

He was relieved to see her smile. ‘Eloquently put.’

Challis drove to his home along roads festooned with twigs, branches and long scraps of bark. By the time he’d cursed his chainsaw into life and sliced the tree up and rolled the segments of trunk out of the way, and showered and dressed again, he was late for the inquest.

The ruling was as expected: the Navy armourer had shot dead the Fiddlers Creek Hotel bouncer, and then committed suicide. He’d been drinking heavily in the main bar, but was also under the influence of a cocktail of drugs bought from a Navy cadet, and this, compounded by his sense of grievance at being ejected from the hotel, had disturbed the balance of his mind.

But the coroner went further. Reading from Challis’s own report, he noted that the armourer had used a Browning automatic handgun from the armoury, and recommended that an investigation be held into how it had been removed despite electronic surveillance measures and bi-weekly spot checks on the inventory, and whether or not other weapons had been removed, and if so, who had them.

The proceedings continued briskly and by early afternoon Challis was stepping out into a ragged wind, fits of sunlight and obscuring cloud masses. He hurried to his car, checked his mobile, and saw that Superintendent McQuarrie had called him. Twice.

‘Challis, sir.’

‘Finally. Was your mobile switched off, Inspector?’

‘Coroner’s inquest, sir, that Navy shooting.’

‘And?’

‘Murder suicide.’

Into the pause that followed, the superintendent said tightly, ‘I understand you went to see my son again.’

‘Sir.’

‘May I ask why?’

‘Loose ends,’ Challis said. Surely Robert hadn’t told his father about last night’s visit. The sister-in-law? No-most probably one of McQuarrie’s spies, he decided.

‘Such as?’

Challis debated with himself. Could he reasonably expect to keep the super from learning about the photographs? Either way, he was in a bind: damned if he told the super, damned if he didn’t. ‘It was partly a courtesy call, sir, and we went over old ground to see if he could remember anything further about his wife.’

‘Old ground? What about new ground, Inspector?’

As if to suggest that Challis hadn’t been thorough the first time around and liked to spend his days upsetting important and influential people.

‘In the absence of leads we have to check phone records again,’ said Challis, ‘read correspondence, look for holes and inconsistencies in witness statements, as well as talk to new witnesses who might come forward.’ Jesus.

McQuarrie was silent. Then he said, ‘I thought we agreed this was a case of the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

You agreed it, Challis thought. ‘It’s important to keep an open mind, sir.’

‘Dig deeper into this witness protection woman.’

‘Sir.’

There was another silence, and then McQuarrie seemed to tiptoe through his words: ‘Is there anything about Janine that I should know, Hal? A secret lover? Was she skimming funds from the clinic? Blackmailing her clients?’

Is McQuarrie simply waiting to be told the worst? wondered Challis, or does he know something that we don’t? ‘Whatever it is, we’ll find it,’ Challis said. You had to say things like that to your boss and a fearful public. He meant it, but he was saying it to shut McQuarrie up. Anxious to get going, he finished the conversation and returned to his office in CIU and a backlog of paperwork that owed plenty to the superintendent’s cost-cutting measures. The budget destroys resources, Challis thought, the paperwork destroys time, and the jargon destroys reason.

Fed up, he went in search of Ellen. ‘Did Meg tell you anything?’

‘Yes and no. They weren’t close, but she did feel that Janine had seemed happier than usual in recent weeks.’

Challis drew his hands tiredly down his cheeks. ‘An affair? Someone in the swingers scene?’

Ellen shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to indicate a lover in her e-mails, phone records or ordinary mail. She didn’t confide in anyone. If there is a lover, she’s covered her tracks well. Do you want me to keep looking?’

He shook his head absently, returned to his office and attacked his in-tray again. At one point he reached for his laptop. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in his car. Then he remembered: he’d left it on his kitchen table. He’d gone home, changed into overalls, cut up the fallen tree, raced off to the inquest. Challis always paid attention to his instincts, and this one was a creeping sensation that told him not to waste a minute of time.

He ran downstairs to the carpark, climbed into the loan car and headed out of town. At the second roundabout he turned northwest, glancing briefly at Waterloo Mowers, where the lights were a dull yellow through a gauze of water droplets and a man in a japara was despondently assessing the ranks of lawn mowers parked on the grass outside. His tyres hissed and other cars tossed dirty scraps of water over his windscreen.

Soon he was driving between a dismal housing estate and a couple of waterlogged horse paddocks, and then was in undulating country, where costly lifestyle houses had scant views over Westernport Bay. Otherwise the houses here were older, faintly rundown fibro, weatherboard and brick-veneer farm dwellings amid rusty sheds, untidy pine trees, orchards and dams. It was turning out to be a wet winter, even this early in the season, and the dams were full, the clay backroads greasy, the roadside ditches running furiously, the floods washing drifts of grit and gravel from adjoining dirt roads across the sealed roads.

That’s how Challis knew his own road, the dirty yellow-brown smear across the bitumen surface. He turned off, splashing through muddy potholes and hearing the heater fan cut out with a death rattle. He came to his driveway and turned in, passing the sawn logs and dead agapanthus stalks, and headed up towards the house, which looked damp, empty, almost forlorn, but familiar in all of its manifestations, and a true home, a haven through the years up until now.

And that’s when he saw the marks in the lawn. Dark brown mud gouges stark against the green. His first thought was: They got bogged. His second and third were: Who? and How did they get out? His fourth, when he found the splintered back door, was: Did they take the laptop?